World Population Growth

There has been a lot of discussion about reproductive issues in class this week. China’s one child policy has been mentioned a few times. I thought I would play Devil’s or possibly Malthus’ advocate.

The world population is growing incredibly fast. The population is currently in excess of of 7 billion people. In 1800 it was less than 1 billion. The current level of population growth is unsustainable. Eventually the human population will exceed the service capacity of the earth. Even before reaching that point hardship and poverty will inevitably become widespread as resources become scarce. So, increased population growth will eventually decrease the quality of life for all humans.

One of the government’s main roles is to curtail some rights in order to preserve the most rights for the most people. Why should reproductive rights be any different? If all individuals male and female on the planet are limited to .5 child per person the population will begin to decrease and can at some point be maintained at a sustainable level.

Education is an ineffective deterrent to reproduction. That is for the simple reason that people who are from large families are going to be far more receptive to the idea of also producing large families. While people who embrace the education and produce few children will likely produce children who follow the reproductive guidelines. This means that in the course of a few generations the population that has not adopted the reproductive guidelines will simply out compete the low reproduction group.

That leaves only the government to curtail the expansion of the population through the application of penalties for non-conformity. By limiting the reproduction of everyone equally the government could produce a society with overall higher quality of life for the entire world.

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§ 2 Responses to World Population Growth

I understand that the population is exceedingly large but I think forcing sterilization, abortion, and laws are not the way to go about the problem. I think education is key here because so many people have babies that are uninformed. I would not want to be told I could only have one child, but there are others that don’t want them at all. So I personally feel that people should have access to contraception especially those in poverty so that those unplanned/ unwanted pregnancies don’t add to the population problem. It seems as though access and education would help in prevention instead of being drastic and setting up a law.

I think this is an extremely touchy subject. I also agree that forced sterilization or abortions are not the cure to the world’s supposed “inevitable shut down”. We focus so much on reproductive rights, race issues, gender issues, but many people don’t consider environmental issues. So many people take our environment for granted. If we keep it up, our earth is going to colapse with or without a child cap. I think there are many preventative ways to sovle the issues of the world, and it might just start with our environment. There is no reason people shouldn’t exist because there’s a fear that they will ruin the planet. We can make it a goal to make a better planet so everyone can live happily, and safely.